Should The UK Bomb Syria?

The west’s involvement in the ongoing war in Iraq and Syria was called into question this week as defence secretary Michael Fallon opened up discussions about extending the current bombing campaign aimed at Islamic State (ISIS) bases in Iraq across the border into Syria. ”We’ve always been clear that Isil [ISIS] has to be defeated in both Syria and Iraq…Isil is organised and directed and administered from Syria. There is an illogicality about not being able to do it.”

In the most straightforward sense, Fallon is completely right: ISIS symbolically and literally bulldozed the border between the two countries in June 2014 and view them as one entity. The group’s reference in its propaganda to the ‘Sykes-Picot border’ sums up the toxic mixture of modern brutality and historical grievance that motivates it: while Sykes-Picot means nothing to most westerners, the 1916 Anglo-French agreement which effectively drew the map of the modern middle east is a powerful symbol of what Islamists see as a century-long western campaign against Muslims in their own countries. The use of ‘Levant’ and ‘al-Sham’ (the ‘L’ or ‘S’ depending on what variant of ISIL/ISIS you’re using) is shorthand for “let us take the whole place back to how it was before those outsiders got involved and everything will be perfect again.” Basically, the mission statement of every racist, nationalist group ever, but in this case further ramped up on religious lunacy.

The case for further British involvement has been emotionally added to by the murder of 30 British tourists in Tunisia, and the suggestion that gunman Seifeddine Yacoubi had some training with ISIS. This may have been a factor in Labour’s cautiously positive response to Fallon’s suggestion. Last time the Conservatives wanted to bomb Syria (in 2013) they were blocked by Labour during a parliamentary vote; this time, Shadow Defence Secretary Vernon Coaker suggested Labour were more likely to support action, as long as four conditions were met:

The government must clearly spell out how wider bombing will help defeat ISIS

There must be clarity about exactly what will take place

The legal case for action must be clear

Other regional powers must support the action, including Iraq

Acting leader Harriet Harman (who previously opposed air strikes) added that Labour would look “very, very seriously” at any action proposed to “tackle the growing horror of ISIL.”

So is military action a foregone conclusion? No. The legacy of Iraq has left a large percentage of the public (and many politicians) wary of getting involved in complicated, brutal foreign wars when there isn’t an obvious threat to our own interests. As despicably brutal as you might find ISIS, if you take the long view that the current instability in the middle east is a symptom of a greater split between the two competing branches of Islam (respectively underwritten by Sunni Saudi Arabia and Shia Iran) then this may just be something that the region needs to burn through itself. And if you take the really long view, you might compare it to Europe’s 30 Year War of the 17th Century which started as a Protestant-Catholic clash, and eventually dragged in most surrounding powers and decimated the continent’s population, but ultimately created modern Europe as we know it.

Others feel that there are simply no good options—Julian Lewis, chair of the defence select committee pointed out that “In 2010 the government wanted to remove Assad without helping al-Qaeda or similar…Now we apparently want to remove (ISIS) but without helping Assad. These two things are incompatible. It is a choice of evils.” Others take the view that when dealing with a death-cult whose supporters are animated by a sense of grievance and victimhood, a western-bombing campaign is likely to attract even more recruits to the ISIS ranks. And finally, you could argue that having just cut the armed forces budget it seems a strange time to be signaling our military prowess to the rest of the world.

The decision will not be taken until after the summer recess (parliament returns on September 7th). By this point, Labour will have a new leader— and if, by some chance, veteran left-winger Jeremy Corbyn has won the vote then he has already signaled his opposition to military action.

Conversely, if a terrorist incident that can be even loosely traced back to ISIS occurs in Britain (and as of last November, apparently 40 attacks had been thwarted), then both the public and governmental mood will change drastically.

Momentum feels like it is moving towards bombing, simply because there are so few political alternatives and such huge differences between the various parties. Any serious, co-ordinated solution would need to involve co-operation with Russia, diplomacy with Iran, meaningful progress with Turkey and its Kurdish minority, a planned exit for Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, legal and personal pressure being placed on individuals in the Gulf states who have financed ISIS and a serious, radical assessment of Islam’s place in Europe. And at the end of that, you might still have to kill thousands of people on the battlefield because thousands of people just want to die on the battlefield and no amount of reasonable discussion or incentive is going to persuade them otherwise.

Given that reality, the government are likely to see this as a choice between doing nothing and at least appearing to do something. And in that context, bombing is better than nothing.

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